A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
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I just cannot find a use case for Nextcloud. I have gone as far as installing it and sync’ing it with my LDAP for user auth and sync pictures from my phone to my NAS. All the other features are just a big ole m’eh for me.
This has just been my experience, so maybe I’m missing something that would just make it all click and make me not live without it. So far though, I’ve spun up and spun down an instance 3 times and never missed it afterwards.
By now it is widely used in my family as backup for our smartphone photos and important documents on PCs. In addition we use it for our calendars, contacts, notes and passwords.
I’m also investigating whether it’s useful to track recipes for the food we normally eat to help manage our usual “what should we eat today” and “what groceries should we buy this week” questions.
For recipe tracking and “what to buy” I’ve actually had good success with https://grocy.info/
Has really cut down on buying things to use only to get home and find out I already had half of it and forgot
I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.
Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.
Came here to say the same. The integration with Collabora is wonderful. I used FileRun and FileBrowser with OnlyOffice in the past, and the experience was totally different (a part that OnlyOffice messes with Excel/Spreadsheets pivot tables, or at least one year ago, making it impossible for people to work with them). I understand the hate, but currently, at least for me, is the closest experience to O365 .
Could you expand a bit more on the LDAP part? I’m thinking of rolling something like that myself but not sure if it’s worth it
I tried a couple of LDAP solutions out there; Windows Server AD, Open LDAP, Samba4 in Debian, TurnKey Solutions LDAP before finally settling on Zentyal. It has a nice to use web GUI and can work in conjunction with AD RSAT tools that I have installed in a throwaway Windows VM for when I need more granular controls the web GUI can’t do.
All my Debian VM’s and laptops connect to Zentyal AD via SSSD.
And how many users are in your ldap config?
Two users and a handful of service accounts. I use it so I have a centralized user authentication system instead of managing multiple individual user accounts.
I used it mostly for calendar and adressbok synchronization between devices bit the performance was so bad O had to replace it.
What did you replace it with? In my case I love my Nextcloud because I have my calendar, adress book, tasks, notes, RSS feed, etc. all in one app but I’m interested to hear alternatives to it
Thank you, I’ll try them out when I find the time :)
I use it to sync all my photoshop projects and documents from my different machines to my server and to have access to those files from my phone , it’s the first thing I install when I do a fresh install of my os since everything I use is there
I like it as basically a self-hosted Dropbox/GDrive for syncing and sharing. I would love for them to focus more on that (performance especially, as others have noted) instead of all the other crap they keep trying to jam into it.